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In the seemingly perpetual battle among cities to secure economic growth, one strategy has gained increasing credence of late: luring the Creative Class. The argument, promulgated by Professor of Economic Development Richard Florida (2002a, pp. 4–5), suggests that human creativity is now the “decisive source of competitive advantage” and cities can thrive by tapping and harnessing such creativity. The primary ingredients in this sweeping recipe for urban success are a group of young, mobile, diverse, ‘creative’ professionals, who constitute a social class of their own, according to Florida's popular book, The Rise of the Creative Class (2002). This Creative Class – if cities can attract and retain it – operates as its own economic machine, producing jobs, enhancing productivity, and increasing the overall well being of the city, Florida argues. From an urban economic development perspective, the role of the city is to create the conditions in which this Creative Class and associated industries can flourish.

The examination of contextual factors that enhance or stifle employees’ creative performance is a new but rapidly growing research area. Theory and research in this area have focused on antecedents of employee creativity. In this paper, we review and discuss the major theoretical frameworks that have served as conceptual foundations for empirical studies. We then provide a review and critical appraisal of these empirical studies. Based on this review, we propose exciting possibilities for future research directions. Finally, we discuss implications of this body of work for human resource management.

The nature of affect and creativity relationship has been under debate, with some studies pointing out that positive affect is conducive, while others arguing that positive affect is detrimental to creative performance. In order to clarify the complicated affect-creativity relationship, we examine several factors that have not been sufficiently looked at: the role of affect characteristics (e.g., temporal factors), neuro-cognitive mechanisms (e.g., set-breaking), and the type of creative task performed (e.g., requiring negative versus positive creativity). To improve our understanding of seemingly inconsistent previous findings, we offer a model that links affect, through a set of mediators and moderators, to creative performance in organizations, accompanying our analysis with a set of 14 testable propositions.

This chapter presents a model of innovation in the public elementary schooling system by drawing on ongoing work on an “Educational Innovations Bank” in India, which seeks to make available a freely accessible forum for innovative teachers and a grassroots innovations resource for administrators. How do some teachers in government elementary schools, working in contexts of socioeconomic and educational deprivation, achieve their educational goals in spite of facing the same constraints as thousands of other teachers? What lessons do they offer for policy reform? The answers draw on the social entrepreneurship and workplace innovation literature to first locate the incentive for innovation in the social value that socio-educationally entrepreneurial and innovative behavior of teachers creates. Next, an examination is presented of how this social value leads to learning for an identity of competence, which in turn provides an incentive for further educational innovation. Finally, the evidence is presented to argue for policy entrepreneurship and a formal framework to help in the diffusion, adoption, and adaptation of both the enabling innovations that result from socio-educational entrepreneurship and the in-school or in-class educational innovations. Such a “bottom-up,” peer-learning-based approach to innovations that also “improve” provides a unique way of visualizing educational reform in resource-constrained public educational systems.

In this chapter, we seek to resolve the long-running controversy as to whether moods foster or inhibit creativity. We base our arguments on a new theory, which we refer to as “creativity-as-mood-regulation,” where employees experiencing moods are envisaged to engage in creative behavior in the hope of regulating their moods. We further suggest that employees with different goal orientations will have different likelihoods of choosing creative activities to regulate their moods. Finally, we identify the specific goal-orientation conditions under which positive and negative moods may facilitate or depress creativity, and develop and discuss six related propositions.

The Morgan Library at Colorado State University in Fort Collins suffered catastrophic flooding as the result of a historic rain storm and flood that swept through the town on July 28, 1997. This study examines this single library's organizational disaster response and identifies the phenomena that the library's employees cited as their motivation for innovation.

Purpose – This study provides an example of a library where a pre-disaster and post-disaster organizational environment was supportive of experimentation. This influenced the employees’ capacity and motivation to create a new tool meant to solve a temporary need. Their invention, a service now called RapidILL, advanced the Morgan Library organization beyond disaster recovery and has become an effective and popular consortium of libraries.

Design/methodology/approach – This is an instrumental case study. This design was chosen to examine the issues in organizational learning that the single case of Morgan Library presents. The researcher interviewed employees who survived the 1997 flood and who worked in the library after the disaster. The interview results and a book written by staff members are the most important data that form the basis for this qualitative research.

The interviews were transcribed, and key phrases and information from both the interviews and the published book were isolated into themes for coding. The coding allowed the use of NVivo 7, a text analysis software, to search in employees’ stories for “feeling” words and themes about change, innovation, motivation, and mental models.

Three research questions for the study sought to learn how employees described their lived experience, how the disaster altered their mental models of change, and what factors in the disaster response experience promoted learning and innovation.

Findings – This study investigates how the disruptive forces of disaster can influence and promote organizational learning and foster innovation. Analysis of the data demonstrates how the library employees’ feelings of trust before and following a workplace disaster shifted their mental models of change. They felt empowered to act and assert their own ideas; they did not simply react to change acting upon them.

Emotions motivate adaptive actions, facilitating change. The library employees’ lived experiences and feelings influenced what they learned, how quickly they learned it, and how that learning contributed to their innovations after the disaster. The library's supervisory and administrative leaders encouraged staff members to try out new ideas. This approach invigorated staff members’ feelings of trust and motivated them to contribute their efforts and ideas. Feeling free to experiment, they tapped their creativity and provided adaptations and innovations.

Practical implications – A disaster imposes immediate and often unanticipated change upon people and organizations. A disaster response urgently demands that employees do things differently; it also may require that employees do different things.

Successful organizations must become adept at creating and implementing changes to remain relevant and effective in the environments in which they operate. They need to ensure that employees generate and test as many ideas as possible in order to maximize the opportunity to uncover the best new thinking. This applies to libraries as well as to any other organizations.

If library leaders understand the conditions under which employees are most motivated to let go of fear and alter the mental models they use to interpret their work world, it should be possible and desirable to re-create those conditions and improve the ability of their organizations to tap into employees’ talent, spur innovation, and generate meaningful change.

Social implications – Trust and opportunities for learning can be central to employees’ ability to embrace change as a positive state in which their creativity flourishes and contributes to the success of the organization. When leaders support experimentation, employees utilize and value their affective connections as much as their professional knowledge. Work environments that promote experimentation and trust are ones in which employees at any rank feel secure enough to propose and experiment with innovative services, products, or workflows.

Originality/value – The first of its kind to examine library organizations, this study offers direct evidence to show that organizational learning and progress flourish through a combination of positive affective experiences and experimentation. The study shows how mental models, organizational learning, and innovation may help employees create significantly effective organizational advances while under duress.

An original formula is presented in Fig. 1.

This chapter provides an in-depth understanding of the cognitive processes that facilitate creativity from a multi-level perspective. Because cognitive processes are viewed as residing within the individual and as an individual-level phenomenon, it is not surprising that a plethora of research has focused on various cognitive processes involved in creative production at the individual level and the factors that may facilitate or hinder the successful application of these processes. Of course, individuals do not exist in a vacuum, and many organizations are utilizing teams and groups to facilitate creative problem solving. We therefore extend our knowledge from the individual to the team level and group level, providing more than 50 propositions for testing and discussing their implications for future research.